I was an investment banker, and my then girlfriend, now my wife, was a corporate lawyer. When Lisa told me how much she earned, which was something like $130,000, I made fun of her. "Lipstick money," I said.

My wife is very smart, much smarter than I am. I don't like this, because I am, or at least used to be, the sort of person who feels diminished when I see someone better than I am. Part of the way I protected myself with Lisa was by gathering up markers of status: prestigious schools, famous friends, money. When I said "lipstick money," we were discussing moving in together and how to split the bills. I'd pay for everything, I told her. She should keep her money to buy herself little treats. I used the phrase because I wanted Lisa to know that her salary and job were minor and childlike compared with mine. Also, the prospect of discussing what was mine and what was hers brings up profound fears. Back then, I saw myself as unlovable, and to discuss money was to place our relationship in the real world, where I'd have to face that Lisa probably did not love me, and that when she said she did, what she meant was that she tolerated me.

There was a third reason for what I said. I was happy and excited to have the opportunity to take care of Lisa. The idea of it made me feel delightfully adult, delightful because I often felt like a child. So my giddiness probably played a part; still, I don't want to deny the darker aspects of my motivations.

Not long after Lisa and I moved in together, we got married, and, not long after that, I asked her if I could quit my job. I hated being an investment banker. The work had no meaning for me and was enormously demanding. I used to leave my office at three or four in the morning, as the coffee-cart guys were setting up outside. I traveled so often that I once reached for the seat belt when I sat down in a movie theater. Even as I moved up the ranks, I saw no end to the awfulness. Being promoted in investment banking is like winning a pie-eating contest for which the prize is more pie.

I visited Lisa at her Manhattan office to ask if I could quit. I had to go there because I rarely got home before she went to bed. Lisa was sitting behind her desk. I was exhausted, so stressed that I nearly started crying.

My wife is calm, compassionate, hopeful. Quietly, she asked what I'd do if I left my job. I had published a novel that was excerpted in The New Yorker and had won various awards. Writing was what I found fulfilling. I told her that I would write another book. How long would it take, she asked, again quietly. About three years, I replied.

It has been nearly 13 years since that conversation. The book, Family Life, came out this April. For most of that period my wife supported us, and all the ways I'd used money to protect my ego were unavailable to me. As for my wife, she had considered us both emotional and financial partners but now found herself the sole breadwinner.

I grew up with very angry parents. Because they were willing to turn their anger on me, I felt powerless and worried that I'd be unable to create a life in which I'd be okay. Not only did I see myself as helpless, but I also sought to make myself helpless. That way, people could prove that they loved me by taking care of me. I remember seeing Ibsen's play A Doll's House and feeling a shock of recognition when Nora tells her husband, "I've lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald," meaning that she had felt compelled to turn herself into a toy because she believed it was the only way she could be loved.

Soon after I quit my job, I took all my savings and paid off my wife's student loans. I then gave Lisa's parents the money she'd borrowed from them to buy her apartment. I put the remaining money under both our names and closed my personal checking account.

Like many people who make themselves dependent, I resented it. Without a checking account, I had to periodically ask Lisa for money, which made me angry at her for not having guessed my thoughts, for putting me in a position in which I had to ask. When we went to dinner and the bill came, it would sit in the center of the table and radiate shame. Even long-established intimacies were harmed. Lisa used to call me "monkey" as a term of affection, but it began bothering me. A monkey was cute but not masculine. I told her to stop, and she was puzzled and hurt that a term that had always contained love was being rejected. And bigger things were being undermined. I would get into bed with her and feel like a child.

The stress of dependency changed not just my marriage, but how I experienced myself more generally. Money had allowed me to be indifferent to the world. As long as I was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, it didn't matter what anybody thought. Now I became the sort of person who wanders around looking for how he is being wronged. If Lisa left her plate at the dinner table, I assumed that she was telling me that my role was that of a housekeeper. I got into senseless arguments with people on the subway, at the post office, in grocery stores. I remember a taxi driver who ignored my request to refrain from talking on his cell phone as he drove; when I got out of the cab, I left the back door open. Each act of bad behavior further sapped my sense of myself as a rational, effective person. I could see that I was petty. I understood that nobody looks at a guy arguing with a homeless man on the sidewalk and thinks, Look at the genius arguing with the homeless guy.

I also found myself feeling alienated from my friends. While I was writing the book, I struggled to explain how I spent my days, which is what I imagine happens to women who quit their jobs to raise children. To say I sat at my desk felt as vague and unsatisfying as saying I'd been chasing around a toddler. The story I was writing had its own life and inclinations like a child does; both tasks inspire powerlessness and frustration. But I did not dare reveal my unease to my friends, who were all working and earning money. The one thing I had that they didn't was the supposed freedom of not having a job. I could not risk tarnishing that bit of luster.

I am describing my own misery, but I could tell that my wife was unhappy too. She laughed less. When she got home from work, she had two glasses of wine instead of one. Some of this must have been due to the financial pressure and some due to living with a changed man. When I asked how she felt about me leaving my job, she said she just wanted me to be happy.

Several months after I quit, we went to Long Island for a weekend, our first break since I'd resigned. As we sat on a lawn by the ocean, my wife told me that she'd had a headache every day since I stopped working, that this moment was the first time in four months that her heart's beating had not caused a matching pulse of pain in her head.

My wife's love for me, the fact that she was willing to endure this much trouble for me, fills me with gratitude. I have only to think of it to be comforted and to feel that I am dear to her.

During the recent financial crisis, my wife's compensation dropped by almost half. We suddenly had to think about money. Eight years after I stopped working, I began looking for a job as a college professor. When my wife asked how much I'd earn, I told her that salaries started at $50,000. She looked surprised: "It hardly seems worth doing, then." The comment left me feeling hollowed out and slightly ridiculous, which is likely what my wife felt at my invocation of "lipstick money."

The first job I got was as an adjunct professor at a small liberal-arts college in Vermont. I'd drive out of New York on Monday morning and return Wednesday night. I rented a room in a house with other adjuncts. I was getting paid $20,000 a semester, and after taxes and rent and gas, what was left seemed like pocket money, real pocket money, unlike my wife's $130,000 salary.

Similar to women who have left the workplace and then tried to reenter, I found it disconcerting to be back at work but in a junior role. To be an adjunct is basically like being a substitute teacher. My colleagues did not take me seriously, and my students thought what I had to say was less important because I was not part of the tenure-track faculty. In my former job, I had 20 people reporting to me.

After working in a field in which money was never lacking, I also found it strange to discover how frugal educational institutions have to be. There was a restriction, for example, on how many photocopies I could make. When I was an investment banker, I often took taxis between European cities because I'd be so tired that I couldn't bear to wait for a train, and it was easy to expense $400 or $500.

Though my earnings seemed like those of an intern, I was pleased to have a checking account and an ATM card again, to put money in my wallet without asking my wife. It gave me a sudden rush of confidence and well-being, like how after a long period without rain there is a cloudburst and the colors become bright and everything seems new.

Making money for the first time in so many years, I was possessive of it. My wife asked me to pay the phone and electricity bills and I thought she was being unreasonable. I have many friends who are enormously successful and whose wives are not as financially fortunate. When I hear them say they would like their wives to pay for a few things, my first instinct is to sympathize with the women. My second, more thoughtful response is to recognize the lack of trust on both sides: The one holding on to the small portion of money fears that his or her spouse does not give willingly, while the one asking the other to contribute feels anxious and unappreciated.

My book came out a few weeks ago, and even if it's a huge success, it will make nowhere near what I would have earned had I continued as a banker. I told my wife this and she said, "It's only money."